Awakening

"Clack! Clack! Clack!" Cold, violent shaking...

This was a train car traveling at high speed. The darkness around it, the violent shaking of the car, and the bloodstains flashing past made it seem like a train racing toward hell.

Ye Siyu climbed up from the cold floor and looked around with an icy expression. His dark, deep-set eyes shone with a calm that seemed entirely at odds with his ordinary face.

"Not bad. You're the best of the people who came this time," a cold voice said.

Ye Siyu turned and saw a black-haired young man sitting on a train seat, staring at him with a sneer. The young man was about twenty-four or twenty-five and utterly ordinary-looking, but several scars ran across his face, giving him a vicious, frightening appearance.

The black-haired young man held a cigarette and took a deep drag. Then his gaze passed over Ye Siyun and settled on something behind him, clearly gesturing for Ye Siyu to look behind him.

Six people lay behind Ye Siyu: four men and two women. Besides them, there were more than a dozen foreigners in this enclosed space.

What surprised the black-haired young man was that Ye Siyu showed no sign of panic after seeing the people lying on the floor. Instead, he calmly walked over to him, as though he hadn't seen the people behind him at all.

"Give me one," Ye Siyu said indifferently.

"Uh... here..." Ye Siyun's behavior caught the black-haired young man off guard. With a strange look on his face, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and handed one to Ye Siyu.

He had never met anyone so strange. After waking up, he hadn't asked a single question, but had come over and asked him for a cigarette.

Ye Siyu took the cigarette and put it straight in his mouth. Then he reached into the pocket on the black-haired young man's chest, took out a lighter, and leaned against the cold wall of the train.

With a click, a crimson flame sprang up. As Ye Siyu lit his cigarette, it also allowed the black-haired young man to see him clearly. He was a young man with a few white hairs mixed into his black hair and an utterly ordinary face that would have been impossible to pick out in a crowd.

But the black-haired young man was already convinced that Ye Siyu was no ordinary person. The indifference on his face and the air of confidence about him were completely at odds with his youthful appearance. His pitch-black eyes in particular were dark and deep, like black holes that swallowed and annihilated everything within them.

"Whew!" Ye Siyu inhaled deeply. Acrid nicotine smoke swirled in his mouth before he blew it out in a white stream like a dragon, making him look deeply melancholy.

"Who are you?" the black-haired young man asked as he watched Ye Siyu smoke in silence. Ye Siyu was simply too strange.

Ye Siyu didn't answer him. He just leaned against the cold wall and smoked quietly, and the atmosphere immediately grew tense and awkward.

"Where is this? Who are you people? Why am I here?" Suddenly, a voice rang out. A man in his twenties who had been lying on the floor sat up and asked Ye Siyu and the black-haired young man those questions.

The man who had awakened was handsome, dressed in leather shoes, dress pants, and a T-shirt of mid- to high-end quality. He gave off an air of shrewd competence tinged with a hint of dejection—a typical urban white-collar worker.

Though the young white-collar worker looked somewhat bewildered and at a loss, his gaze remained steady, making him seem very calm. Only the slight trembling of his body showed that he wasn't as calm inside as he appeared, but was forcibly suppressing his panic.

"Not bad luck. Another newcomer of good quality," the black-haired young man said with a nod as he watched the white-collar worker wake up, easing the awkwardness from his encounter with Ye Siyu.

Ye Siyun paid him no attention and simply continued smoking in silence, as though none of it had anything to do with him.

"Think carefully,

it should have already implanted all of this in your mind," the black-haired young man said, taking a deep breath. At the same time, he kept an eye on Ye Siyun for any reaction, but unfortunately, Ye Siyu showed no change in emotion and continued leaning against the wall with an icy expression.

Before long, the remaining three men and two women on the floor woke up one after another.

"This time it's Resident Evil Part One. You rookies sure are lucky, running into such an easy horror movie on your first trip in. Even if you die, it should be an easy death." The black-haired young man took one last deep drag, then crushed the remaining cigarette butt hard in his palm.

"Do you mean that only our consciousness has entered a computer, like something out of a fantasy novel? Once we finish this game, our consciousness will return to our bodies, and we'll come back to life?" A chubby young man sitting beside the white-collar worker asked.

"I don't know whether it's our consciousness, but I do know that in this game, you can get hurt, feel pain, and die!"

"The scenarios we enter are different every time. They might be ones you've seen, or they might not be. The Lord God adds newcomers each time to replace the newcomers who died in the last horror movie. Each scenario has between seven and twenty people in total. In other words, Resident Evil 1 is a very low-risk horror movie, which is why there are only eight of us altogether." As the black-haired young man spoke, he drew a Desert Eagle gleaming with silver light and adjusted it.

"Tch! How do you know they died? Maybe they went back to their bodies ages ago and are living it up! If you ask me, this is just a virtual reality game that hasn't been released yet," the chubby young man sneered dismissively.

The young man was clearly provoked by those words. A cold light flashed in his eyes, and he bent forward. In the next instant, he seemed to turn into a black panther as he pounced on the chubby young man, knocking him to the floor and shoving the gun into his mouth. He raved about the horrors he had encountered in his first horror movie. The murderous intent in his eyes was only a cover for the fear in his heart.

"Then do you want to try dying? Can you imagine that infinite terror? I've been through three horror movies. The first was A Nightmare on Elm Street 1. Fifteen newcomers took part in that one, and there were also two veterans who had survived two horror movies. But do you know how it ended? They were all killed in their dreams. Only one other person and I survived. Do you want to know what it feels like to be killed by an utterly absurd dream? Do you want to see everything around you turn into writhing rotten flesh and, in a horribly sinister factory, witness the agony of your own body being slowly crushed, bit by bit, by a pair of scissors? You piece of trash! Do you want to die?"

The black-haired young man shouted frantically, the murderous intent in his eyes unmistakable. The chubby young man was so terrified that his whole body had gone limp, and with the gun barrel shoved into his mouth, he couldn't even beg for mercy.

The white-collar worker and the other two men and two women talked them apart. The black-haired young man sneered and returned to his previous seat. Still fingering his gun, he said, "Dying in a horror movie means real death. And when the demons in these horror movies torture you to death, you'll die a miserable death. So if you're not determined to live, I'd kill myself right now if I were you."

The young woman with glasses, who had been the third to wake up, suddenly said, "Then is there no way for us to return to our bodies?"

The black-haired young man sneered. "I've been saying all along that it isn't your consciousness that entered a computer. Do you think human technology could create this game? No, this is the work of gods. We're nothing but insects in their eyes. They caught us and threw us into horror movies to struggle for their amusement. We entered this world in both body and mind. We can't go back. At least, I don't think we can anymore."

The woman with glasses had a calm air about her. She thought for a moment and said, "From the way you say it, it sounds like there really is hope of going back?"

The black-haired young man raised his eyes and glanced at the young woman with glasses. "The newcomers really are good this time... That's right, there is hope of going back."

At those words, everyone except Ye Siyu held their breath. The other seven stared straight at the black-haired young man.